Author's Note: My first foray into a new fandom! I love Sherlock, and this was a blast to write. Please review!

Human Error

(i)

He doesn't care for Molly Hooper, doesn't even see her. It starts because she's ordinary, the not caring. Because she's utterly plain, utterly predictable, and therefore, utterly dull.

It's almost aggressive, her ordinariness, as if she's actively trying to bore him. Everyone's a goldfish eventually, but most at least put up a fight for the proverbial three seconds. They're either tight-lipped or uptight, trying to hide something by saying nothing, or prove something by saying no. They thrash about a bit in their bowls. And for the time it takes him to deduce their secret or their pressure point, to break them down into component parts to be read or rearranged, they're interesting.

Not so Molly Hooper. She's clingwrap transparent and just as pliable, a particularly apt analogy, given that she helps him keep things from decomposing.

He discovers all of this when he sweeps into the morgue one morning and finds there's a new pathologist, and she's moved his cultures. She stammers some nonsense about that lamp being too hot, and that one being too cold, and this one being just right, and it's not nonsense, annoyingly, because this lamp really is the appropriate temperature. But he's hardly going to encourage her. "Yes," he says drily, "a veritable three bears fairy tale of a heating device." She flushes a furious shade of pink.

Lestrade rescues her by asking to see the body. In twenty seconds he knows everything there is to know about the murder, and about her.

"Oh, you've not met, have you?" observes Lestrade, eagle-eyed as ever. "Sherlock, this is Doctor Molly –"

"Hooper, yes," he says.

He could say a great deal more.

(Just past thirty, single, living alone. Trained upstairs, likely top of her class, since she managed to get this job, and not through a family connection. Mother dead, fifteen-odd years ago, by the look of her earrings – twenty years older than she is and better cared for, ergo her late mother's. Father sick, by the look of her collar – indentations from a hospital visitor's badge, only distributed to immediate family of long-term patients. Ten-year-old cat, morbidly obese, for company, and a tuna sandwich for lunch.)

But he doesn't. People are always accusing him of saying thoughtless things, and it's irritating, the implication that he doesn't think before he speaks, when in fact he thinks multiples more than they do and says fractions of what he sees. Just because he says things he shouldn't doesn't mean he says everything he could. People should be more grateful.

With that in mind, he decides to indulge himself. "Time to go, Lestrade," he adds. "We mustn't keep Doctor Hooper from her date."

She freezes, like a deer caught in headlights. "What – I'm not – how did –"

"Come now," he says, "your jumper and trousers are new. You really should wash new clothes before you wear them, you know – I can smell the Marks & Spencer bargain bin from here – and a quick ironing wouldn't go amiss either – creases, very visible, very distracting. And your make-up, a bit heavy, especially around the cheekbones, which suggests you don't wear it often. People tend to overdo things they haven't practiced."

She stares at him, wide-eyed. Her hand drifts up to rub at her cheek.

"New clothes, new make-up, suggest date, but what makes me think we're keeping you from it? Lipstick."

She blinks, her fingers migrating to her lips. "Lipstick?" she murmurs.

"Recently refreshed. You wouldn't refresh your lipstick at the end of your shift unless you were going to meet Doctor Liver Disease directly after. And you're clearly anxious to leave the lab. You've glanced at the clock every thirty seconds since we've been here – like clockwork, incidentally – and you're awfully restless for someone whose job requires patience and precision."

Now all she can manage is a whisper. "Doctor Liver Disease?"

He's pleased she caught that. "The man pacing in the lobby upstairs. Doctor O'Dougherty, I believe his scrubs said? Clearly a heavy drinker, liver should fail within the decade. I could explain if you like, but at this point, I think we should just agree you'll take my word for it."

She's speechless. He's smug. Lestrade's shaking his head. "Take a day off, Sherlock," he groans.

"I can afford to," he replies, straightening his cuffs. "You, on the other hand, have an arrest to make."

"Come off it!" Lestrade protests. "You haven't even looked at the body!"

"No," he says, making sure to speak slowly, "you haven't looked at the body." He adjusts his coat across his shoulders. "It was the girlfriend."

Molly Hooper recovers just enough to frown down at the medical file and contribute. "Girlfriend?" she asks. "He was married."

He smirks as he turns away. "Exactly."

He's baffled her, so when he informs her from the doorway that her cat's in need of diet food, she just gapes, and when he adds that he's in need of mid-sections, week-old at most, she just gapes and nods.

He smiles the smile that Mrs. Hudson describes as frightful and lights a B&H as he leaves the room.

Later, when he's wrist-deep in two-day-old torso, he reflects that while he's gratified he'll no longer have to wheedle out parts, he's also slightly disappointed. Doctor Molly Hooper might as well be Mrs. Hudson's stupidly patterned wallpaper, for all the amusement she'll provide.

No, he realizes, that's too generous. At least he can shoot the wallpaper.

"You've just scared her is all," Lestrade tells him assuredly, "so best not get too comfortable. I know Molly. She'll develop a backbone with you soon enough."

Lestrade knows Molly Hooper about as well as he knows his wife, as it turns out, because she emphatically doesn't. What she develops is a crush.

"I was wondering if you'd like to have coffee."

"Black, two sugars, please. I'll be upstairs."

Inexplicably, she's one of the first things John brings up, after he's saved his life and feels entitled to ask about it.

"So," he says one morning, picking up his mug with deliberate nonchalance. "Girls."

It's two unrelated words, so he doesn't look up from improving the Times crossword. John is like all toddlers and most adults; if you leave him alone long enough, he'll eventually stop crying and tell you what he wants. The silence drags. Their coffee cools.

Finally, "Not your area, you said?"

"Mm," he confirms.

"So, you and Molly Hooper never…?" He trails off expectantly, but when no response is forthcoming, tries again. "You and Molly Hooper were never…together?"

He scratches out eleven down – juvenile. "Mrs. Hudson doesn't buy her herbal soothers at the chemist," he observes.

"What?"

He looks up. "I'm sorry, I thought we were stating the obvious."

John rolls his eyes. "The way she acts, I thought you might have a bit of a…" – he shrugs – "…history. She does you a lot of favors, and that thing where she blushes all down her…?" He gestures in the general direction of his neck and chest.

He closes the paper, folds it in a crisp half. This conversation is in desperate need of clarity. "She's a puppy, John," he says, "which I hope isn't your area either."

John lets out a low whistle. "You can be a bit of a dick, you know that?"

He smirks. "You're just getting that now?"

It's not a perfect metaphor, he knows. Redbeard certainly never wore lipstick for him. But, in this case, he's willing to congratulate himself on an imperfect one.

And then one day, she walks into the lab with Jim from I.T.

"So you're Sherlock Holmes. Molly's told me all about you. You on one of your cases?"

"Jim works in I.T., upstairs. That's how we met. Office romance."

"Gay."

"Sorry, what?"

"Nothing. Um, hey."

…

"He's not gay! Why'd you have to spoil – ? He's not."

…

"Tinted eyelashes. Clear signs of taurine cream around the frown lines. Those tired, clubber's eyes. Then there's his underwear."

"His underwear?"

"Visible above the waistline, very visible, very particular brand. That, plus the extremely suggestive fact that he just left his number under this dish here, and I'd say you better break it off now and save yourself the pain."

After, John rustles up his magnifying glass once more. He never learns.

"So," he says, folding his arms over his chest. "You and Molly. No history at all, you said?"

"Mm."

"Because you didn't care one bit about that bloke she brought in – didn't even look up – until she said 'office romance.' And then you wouldn't stop, would you? Christ, the three pounds, and the gay thing." He lets his head fall into his hands. "Your 'break it off' was a bit…heated," he adds through his fingers.

"You really should leave the deductions to me, John."

"Yes, well, I don't get annoyed when my co-workers bring in their boyfriends."

"I wasn't annoyed. I was –"

"Irritated?"

"Gotten out your thesaurus again, have you? I thought by now you'd have a firmer grasp on what I look like when I'm annoyed. No. I was disappointed. Molly has truly appalling taste in men. And," he adds, "she's a puppy. We've discussed this."

"Ah." He doesn't let it go, though. "Have it your way, then," he continues. "I don't get disappointed when my puppies bring in their…well, their boyfriends."

"I think this metaphor may have exhausted its usefulness."

John gives him a meaningful look. "Yeah," he says, "I think it may have."

And he has no idea what that means until he discovers in the sickly glow of the swimming pool that Jim from I.T. is Moriarty, and Moriarty is him – a high-functioning sociopath staring down the barrel of boredom.

And then Molly Hooper is more mystery than mongrel, because the Consulting Criminal hunts what she is not: a diversion.

It's to get to him, of course, but how? There are ways to gain entrance to Bart's that do not require seducing lonely pathologists over chicken tikka carry-out and episodes of Glee, ways that involve marginally more creativity but significantly less suffering. So why bother with her?

"Maybe he wanted something you have," suggests John.

"I don't have anything," he snaps impatiently.

"No, Sherlock," John sighs, "you really do."

He considers this with his tea against his fingertips.

She offers admiration, obviously, but Moriarty hardly lacks admirers – fans. Criminals love company, and criminals who consult the Consulting Criminal love to watch things burn. And in any case, Molly Hooper's admiration is a poor prize. It's less articulate than John's, less satisfying than Lestrade's, produces fewer tangible benefits than Mrs. Hudson's. In fact, it's more adoration than admiration, and mousy at that, all wide eyes and slack jaw and quiet, skittish infatuation.

Not ego, then, but something simpler, or even simplest. He wonders if it's to do with sex. How disappointing that would be, how predictable and dull, to find that Moriarty is bound by such base instincts. That a mind made for weaving webs would squander neurons on increased blood flow and muscular contractions. That a man made for pulling triggers would waste three weeks pulling his pathologist. He feels a shiver of displeasure – no, of distaste – at the thought.

His – his – pathologist. It's not until it's crossed his mind that he realizes. He's thought of Molly Hooper as someone who brings him coffee laced with sugars and feeble seductions, as someone he tolerates, repudiates, manipulates. But never as someone that's his, something he has, as if it would upset him to lose her.

He fishes his phone from his pocket.

Come to Baker Street. Bring femurs. SH

Sherlock?

Obviously, given number, street, parts, initials. Are you on your way? SH

I'm feeling a bit under the weather right now, actually…

Why? The end of a brief liaison with a sociopathic serial killer hardly warrants prolonged mourning. SH

…

If anything you should be celebrating. SH

…

Molly. SH

Sorry, yes, I'll come.

Good. Bring food. SH

I thought you said femurs.

Yes. Now I've said both. SH

And then he finds that he is disappointing, predictable, and dull.

Because, annoyingly, his inbox is invariably overflowing with emails from husbands-stroke-boyfriends who want their wives-stroke-girlfriends followed-stroke-photographed. He's attempted to stem the tide, of course. He's posted invectives on his website, but John says that no one reads that. He's told John to post invectives on his blog, but John says that disparaging the boring clients will only drive off the interesting ones. Things were simpler before John arrived and started saying things.

In any case, if he was in this for the living, he would make it justifying jealousy.

It's inevitably dressed up, the jealousy, either clipped into bullet point suspicions, brittle with paranoia, or tortured into interminable essays, describing every deception in detail before petering finally into too-familiar farewells – yours truly, warmest regards – rightfully embarrassed by the pathetic manifestos that precede them. But the theme is always this: man doesn't want woman until she doesn't want him.

It's a tiresome rigmarole, and one to which he is pleased he will never stoop – that is, until Molly Hooper arrives at his flat, for his landlady's Christmas party, wearing lipstick for someone else.

He could say that it affects him, the clinging fabric, the impractical footwear, the ridiculous bouffant, not only because it's designed to be affecting – and is – but also because it's more effort than she's ever put in at Bart's. It rankles him somehow, somewhere sunk deep beneath his sternum, the realization that all this affectation is for another man, a man who's likely idiotic and certainly inane and demonstrably not him. He could say that he finds her disappointingly fickle, could ask her if she makes coffee – black, with two sugars – for this idiotic, inane imposter, whoever he is. Or he could say that Lestrade ought to stop gaping, because it's not that shocking, at least not to him.

He's always known what Molly Hooper looks like under all of those hideous jumpers.

What he does say is: "Miss Hooper has love on her mind. The fact that she's serious about him is clear from the fact she's giving him a gift at all. That all would suggest long-term hopes, however forlorn. And that she's seeing him tonight is evident from her makeup and what she's wearing. Obviously trying to compensate for the size of her mouth and breasts –"

Dearest Sherlock

Love Molly xxx

It's for him after all.

People are always accusing him of saying thoughtless things, and it's irritating, the implication that he doesn't think before he speaks. Nothing he says is ever thoughtless. Although, he thinks, sometimes it's…

"You always say such horrible things. Every time. Always. Always."

"I am sorry," he says – and is. "Forgive me." She's looking up at him, all wide eyes and slack jaw and quiet, humiliated hopes, and she's right. He always says such horrible things, every time, always. "Merry Christmas, Molly Hooper." Her cheek is chill beneath his lips, and he does not linger.

But he finds, somehow, somewhere sunk deep beneath his sternum, that it's difficult not to.

Thank you for the scarf.

You gave me a gift, now I've reciprocated. No need to thank me. SH

Well, thank you anyway. It's cozy, and I like the pink stripes.

Mrs. Hudson chose it. SH

I figured as much. Couldn't imagine you rooting through the Marks & Spencer bargain bin :P

Really, Molly? Emoticons? You have a medical degree. SH

Do I? :) :D ;) ;P

Hopeless. SH

…

I asked her to, though. SH

Hm? Asked who to what?

Asked Mrs. Hudson. To choose a gift for you. SH

Oh. Right. I know. Thank you.

Merry Christmas, Molly. SH

Merry Christmas, Sherlock.

"You're a bit like my dad. He's dead. No – sorry –"

"Molly, please don't feel the need to make conversation. It's really not your area."

"When he was dying, he was always cheerful. He was lovely. Except when he thought no one could see. I saw him once. He looked sad."

"Molly –"

"You look sad, when you think he can't see you. Are you okay? And don't just say you are, because I know what that means, looking sad when you think no one can see you."

"You can see me."

"I don't count."

…

"What I'm trying to say is that, if there's anything I can do, anything you need, anything at all, you can have me. No – I just mean – I mean – if there's anything you need – it's fine."

"But what could I need from you?"

He considers this with his Strad against his shoulder.

It was a gift, the Strad, from a client who's no longer lounging in a Sicilian cell and grateful for it. They're all grateful, once he's cracked their case, put together their puzzle, once he's done something for them that they can't do for themselves, once he's put his inhuman mind to their human problem. Lestrade is the same, with his myriad murders, Mrs. Hudson, too, with her husband. Even John, with his limp, with his boredom and resentment. But Molly….

Molly Hooper has never brought him an ordinary problem, has never brought him a problem at all. Instead she brings him coffee laced with sugars and feeble seductions.

And herself, she'd said, if there's anything he needs.

"Maybe he wanted something you have," John had said.

"I don't have anything."

"No, Sherlock, you really do."

Things were simpler before John arrived and started saying things.

"You're wrong, you know. You do count. You've always counted, and I've always trusted you. But you were right. I'm not okay."

"Tell me what's wrong."

"Molly, I think I'm going to die."

"What do you need?"

"If I wasn't everything that you think I am, everything that I think I am, would you still want to help me?"

"What do you need?"

"You."

She helps him die. She finds the him that Moriarty found first, dresses him up in thick wool and thin blood, and helps him fall to his permanent destination. Moriarty rarely makes mistakes, but on that roof he makes two. One: thinking his own death is necessary. Two: thinking Molly Hooper's is not.

After – after the lie leaves his lips and his legs leave the ledge – she lets him into the dim entry of her flat. It was decided, in the main by himself and Mycroft, that he would come here. For the next three weeks, he will hide, and he will plan.

But for now, he lingers, inexplicably, two feet from her floral-print floor lamp and two feet from her.

There is something strange in the space between them, something that he is – annoyingly, irritatingly, bafflingly – unable to identify. It makes the emptiness oddly corporeal. The air seems more than its atoms, thick and heavy and humming. He feels both form and charge.

He wonders if it's something to do with being dead. There are precious few now who know where he isn't – cold on a colder slab – still fewer who know where he is. Excepting his brother, his parents, and his homeless network, the world beyond the two of them and this space between believes he no longer exists. Perhaps it's some melodramatic notion of contracted being that makes this little circle of light feel so close around them. Perhaps sentimentality is a side effect of simulated suicide, and he's imagining things.

He meets her eyes and knows he isn't.

But then she says, "Want a deep-fried Mars Bar? I've got them on now."

His lips quirk, the strangeness evaporates. He can suddenly smell the near-sickly sweetness of nougat in caramel in chocolate in dough in oil, can hear it crackling atop the stove. "Deep-fried Mars Bars?" he repeats. "Bit self-indulgent, don't you think?"

She shrugs and says, with a small smile, "Well…I'm trying to make this as close to the after-life as possible, aren't I? And in my after-life, there'll be deep-fried Mars Bars."

"Even on Tuesdays at…" – he glances at his watch – "midnight?"

"Even on every day at midnight."

He laughs then, and it's so unexpected that it nearly catches in his throat, comes out low and hoarse. She leads him down the hall to the kitchen, and he stands behind her, arms folded, muttering imprecations against her cat – a new one, Toby, not He of the Obvious Obesity – as it wends its way around his ankles. He shuts up when he bites into a bar. It is exquisite. They chew in silence, leaning against the linoleum counter.

Finally, he speaks. "Shall we send a box of these to my brother?"

"I thought you said he was on a diet."

He smirks. "Precisely."

She beams – actually beams – then pinks and presses her lips together, fumbling for another sweet. She's always been irrationally insecure about her crooked canines, hiding them behind mugs and microscopes and half-grins, as if anyone would notice an off tooth or two on a woman wearing a bright pink sweater with pom-pom trim. He wonders whether he can cure her with compliments, whether he can manage it in less than a month. He feels he should, for her sake.

She's much more…affecting when she smiles properly.

And so, on that first night, in those first hours, he stands and eats diabetic nightmares with the imperative Molly Hooper and feels ironically alive.

Later, she gives him a tour of the flat, which he supplements when she leaves for Bart's next morning. (Small, busy, but neat. Cleaned on alternate weeks, going by the precarious stacks of periodicals – littered across various surfaces, but never more than a fortnight deep. Scientific journals, mostly, but tedious women's magazines too, neither of which offers any insight into their subscriber beyond profession and gender. More lucrative are the photographs, both the ones in frames – parents, no siblings, a few, close friends – and the ones in a shoebox at the back of her closet – four ex-boyfriends, and Jim).

Still later, their clumsy cohabitation assumes a routine. He sleeps rarely and at odd hours, so is sometimes awake when she leaves for Bart's and cut-up bodies. She reappears some hours later and there is food, either carry-out, inexpertly packaged in leaky boxes and crumpled plastic bags, or home cooking, inexpertly attempted in amusing contrast to the precision of her pathology. Then, twice, they play a board game – chess, which he wins, and Operation, which she does – but more often he retreats back to her spare bedroom and cut-up bodies of a different type.

There is also, after all, the business of being dead.

"James Moriarty isn't a man at all," he had told that already-corrupted court. "He's a spider. A spider at the center of a web. A criminal web with a thousand threads, and he knows precisely how each and every single one of them dances."

Moriarty drew in both villains and victims, and dismantling his network must begin with the unromantic task of tacking up names and faces and tracking them across Europe and beyond.

One evening, he discovers that the spare is no longer sufficient for that purpose.

"What – you've – why are you in here?" she near shrieks when she comes home to find him face-up on her bed, three patches on his forearm and three dozen pictures on her walls.

He doesn't look up. "Not enough space," he says, gesturing vaguely.

"But you've put a million holes through the wallpaper!" she protests. "My landlady – I've got to fill them all in or she'll take it out of my security deposit. That's why I put up corkboards in the other room."

"Well, Molly," he replies slowly, "perhaps you should consider renting from someone who isn't a veritable tyrant."

"Not all of us can get our landlady's husband off a murder charge, you know."

"On."

"On what?"

"I got Mr. Hudson on a murder charge, thank you very much."

She wears black to his funeral.

"Uncharacteristically morbid, Molly," he comments when she emerges from beneath a sopping umbrella. And it is – clunky clogs, wool tights, and a dark dress that looks a bit like a box. Not a single pigment, pattern, or pom-pom in sight. "Doesn't really suit you," he concludes, turning back to the Times crossword, which has gotten no less juvenile since his false fall.

She stops short, the umbrella half-shut and dripping onto the welcome mat. "Suit me?" she repeats. Her voice has an odd edge to it, and he wonders if she's caught a cold. He'll tell her to make tea.

"No, it doesn't. Frankly, your usual wardrobe brings to mind that of an eighty-year-old apocalypse survivor, but at least it doesn't make you look quite so pale."

She'd been frozen before, but suddenly she begins to move with startling speed, her limbs jerking haphazardly as she peels off her coat, pushes it onto a peg, shoves off her shoes. "Funnily enough," she says too loudly, "on the occasions when I wear it, I'm not really concerned about what suits me."

He frowns, but before he can decide what's wrong with her, she flushes and freezes again, this time with her arms folded across her chest. "Sorry…" – she exhales heavily – "…it's just – I just mean…." She picks at a piece of thread at her left elbow. "…It's fine."

"Molly –" he begins.

A knock at the door makes her jump. She shoots him a panicked look and an imprecise gesture, but he doesn't move. The doorstep's at the wrong angle for anyone on it to see the sofa. She goes to the door, and though she pulls her ponytail over her shoulder to tug nervously at the damp strands, he knows it's no one dangerous by the way her shoulders sag when she opens it. He watches the back of her neck, where a constellation of freckles disappears beneath her collar, and listens to the voices that filter down the hall.

"Hello!" (Woman, mid-thirties, by her pitch. Trying to sound brighter than she feels. Trying to compensate for something.) "You don't happen to have any cinnamon, do you? I've just opened a packet of biscuits, and I like to sprinkle a bit on. But," she continues, "if you haven't got any on hand, don't bother tearing up your cupboards for it." Her tone softens. "I'm really here to see if you're all right."

"Oh," Molly replies. "I'm all right." Then, after a pause, "I'm just…." Her breath catches in a soft sob. He rolls his eyes. They clearly need to discuss how to get rid of unwanted visitors. Lesson one: don't start weeping.

"Oh, Mol…." There is the crumpled-fabric sound of an embrace. "I'm so sorry. I know how much you cared about him."

Molly's next murmur is muffled, probably against the shoulder she's crying on. He sighs and soundlessly re-opens the anatomy textbook he found on her bedroom bookcase. "Want to come over to mine?" the woman says. "I've got those biscuits, and there is some truly crap telly on this time of day."

"Thanks, but I'm all right. I'd rather be alone for a bit, really."

"Okay. Well, if you need anything, yeah?"

She begins to shuffle off, but then Molly speaks. He resists the urge to slam the book shut in annoyance. Lesson two: don't prevent them from leaving. "None of it's true, you know," she says. "What they're saying about him in the papers. It's not true."

There is a beat of silence. "I know," the woman says finally. "Didn't believe it for a second."

"You didn't?"

"No. Some people really are just that extraordinary."

After she's gone, Molly loiters in the hall, swiping at her wet eyes with her sleeve. "My neighbor," she says when she turns, trying for nonchalance. "Mary Morstan."

"Mm."

"I'm thinking of introducing her to John," she continues. "She's a nurse, and they're looking for a new doctor at her clinic."

He looks up at that. "What does that have to do with John?"

"He left the last clinic after things fell apart with Sarah."

"Yes, and…?" he asks, turning back to a diagram of the endocrine system. "We've done perfectly well financially since the Reichenbach case."

For a moment, she is silent, and then the moment multiplies. His eyes skim from pituitary to pancreas. At last, "And what do you think he's going to do now you're dead?"

He snorts, flips the page. "I'm not dead, Molly. I'm pretending to be dead."

"I know."

Another snort, and a pointed glance this time. "Do you?"

She flushes. "Yes, Sherlock, I do," she says, too loud once more. "But John doesn't, does he? He was mourning at your funeral just now." She stalks past him to the spare bedroom, and he's about to tell her that scowling really isn't her area – it makes her look like an angry rodent – when she adds, in the second before the door slams shut, "And he wasn't pretending."

In such a small flat, he cannot avoid her. It's too bad. He prefers to text, and apologies, in particular, are easier in print. She is sitting on the far left seat of the sofa, her legs in checked flannel and pulled up to her chest. She sleeps that way too – lying on her mattress, he's felt the groove made by her curled body beneath his own. It's typical of Molly Hooper to take up so little of her own space.

"What is that screeching?" he asks.

"Oh, sorry. I can turn it down if you're –"

"No need." He moves around the armchair and gestures to the cushion beside her. "May I?"

"Oh – um – yeah." She wraps her arms around her knees, a dense sphere of discomfort. "The cookies are chocolate chip," she adds, nodding to the platter on the coffee table. He takes one and leans back against the seat.

"So?" he says after a moment. "The screeching?"

"Oh! Um – she's – the woman in pink – she's just found out her baby is that man's and not her husband's."

"Well, clearly," he offers. "Look at the state of her husband's trainers."

She turns her head to ask him to explain, but then seems to think better of it. She bites her lip and holds her tongue. They sit in silence. The husband is trying to throttle the lover, who looks distinctly unenthusiastic about the newest addition to his bloodline.

"I am sorry," he says. The woman in pink begins to wail at an entirely new register. "The last time you wore that dress was for your father's funeral. Stain remover on the hem where you washed the cemetery dirt out," he elaborates when she looks at him. "Nine months old. Cancer?"

She nods and visibly swallows.

"I am sorry," he says again. "I realize that what I said about the dress was…not entirely good."

She runs her fingers over the turn-ups of her pajama bottoms. "No," she agrees. "But it's all right."

The host decides that the fight has outlived its entertainment value. He jerks his thumb at a pair of burly security guards. "Was there a funeral?" Molly asks suddenly. "For…" – she hesitates around the name – "Irene Adler?"

There is little she could have said to surprise him. As it is, not a single word comes readily to mind. He remembers the Woman, has thought of her more often than he will ever admit, but was sure he was the only one.

"Was that her name?" she says when he doesn't respond. "I only glanced at the file, after you…identified her." She blushes and turns determinedly to the screen.

He realizes she doesn't know about all that came after the Woman's Christmas text: her resurrection, her pulse, her plan revealed. And of course, she doesn't know about his rescue, their fly-by-night fleeing to a city eight hundred miles away. Irene Adler was her name, but isn't anymore.

"No," he answers at last. "Not that I am aware of."

She frowns. "You didn't want to go?"

"Why would I want to go?"

She shrugs. The security guards drag the men off camera. "To pay your respects, to show you cared…?"

"Who says I cared?"

"You had a cigarette," she says. "I saw you in the hall. At the hospital. You hadn't had one in ages – but you had one then."

He stills his fingers where they're tapping against the armrest. "Hardly," he replies carefully, and he turns to smile at her. "It was low-tar."

She smiles back, but hers is sadder.

They sit up late, laughing at the television and licking smears of chocolate chips from their fingertips. "You should," he says casually when she asks him to pass over the throw draped across his side of the sofa.

She wraps the wool around her shoulders, ensconcing herself in a knit cocoon. "Should what?"

"Introduce Maggie to John."

She blinks. "Maggie?" He waits for her mind to catch up with his words. "Oh! Mary."

He shrugs. "Mary, then."

"You think so?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

He shrugs again,but this time finds he has to try for indifference. "John likes cinnamon on his biscuits too."

One night, late, he's lying atop her bedspread, staring past the ceiling and its stuck-on galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stars. Five victims, five modi operandi…one murderer. He's sure of it. One serial killer, one with the brawn to shoot, strike, stab, smother, strangle in turn, the brains to know Scotland Yard would never connect the crimes, and the psychosis to kill with increasing intimacy.

"Reminds me of my first blood draw."

He purses his lips. "Shouldn't you be asleep, Molly?" he says without turning. "You have four autopsies scheduled for tomorrow, and according to your files, there's rather a lot to get through on Mr. Nichols, unless someone slipped on the numpad."

"You mean because he was overweight," she says flatly. She doesn't wait for an answer before adding, disapprovingly, "He had Type II diabetes."

"Yes, well, cause and effect," he muses. He has a sudden thought. "Speaking of, it's midnight isn't it?"

"Half past." She pauses. "I'll make them if you apologize to Mr. Nichols."

He frowns. "Mr. Nichols is dead."

"Well-spotted," she quips. "And the dead deserve a little respect." He sits up on his elbows to look at her. She has her arms crossed and her eyebrows raised, and her lips are tilted in the nervous, little half-smirk that means she's challenging him, which is often, lately. It happened when he taped a photograph of a severed head to her bathroom mirror. It happened when he proposed a perfectly harmless experiment on Toby. It happened when he woke her up at four in the morning by standing at the foot of her bed and giving it a kick.

Apparently "looming over people in the dark" is "unsettling."

"She'll develop a backbone with you soon enough," Lestrade had said. And if by "soon enough" he meant "after you've faked your death and appropriated her bedroom," then it seems he was right. For once.

He's not sure he likes the backbone, but he likes the smirk.

So he says, "Fine. I am sorry, Mr. Nichols, that the cholesterol from your daily double cheeseburger detached from your arteries and killed you, thus necessitating this apology."

She sighs heavily. "All right. How many do you want?"

He grins the frightful grin. "How many do you have?"

She laughs and disappears into the kitchen. "And Molly?" he calls to her retreating back. "Don't do sarcasm. It's not your area." He hears her snort from the stovetop and collapses back down, smiling and oddly cheerful.

But then he starts to think, and his smile fades. The telltale crackling of oil issues from beyond. "Reminds me of my first blood draw," she had said. He pushes himself up and off the mattress.

"Blood draw, blood draw…," he mutters, ripping one of the photographs from the wall. Its tack makes an angry slicking sound as it unsticks, but he doesn't hear it hit the floor.

"Molly!"

"Hm?"

"Molly!"

By the time she reappears, he's knocked through a half-dozen file stacks and emerged exultant, five folders in hand. "What were you thinking, when you said that?" he asks.

"Said what?"

It was a rhetorical question, so he's no longer listening, hardly logs the clink of dish on dresser as she sets down the deep-fried desserts, comes to stand by his side. His mind is already racing ahead, rushing down a twisting, turning palace corridor made suddenly straight by….

He meets her gaze, flushed with triumph. "Five murders, Molly," he says, "and nothing in common except –" His finger jabs at manila. " – poorly-executed blood draws."

She blinks, then holds out her hands, begins to flip, finds the first victim's medical records, then the second's, third's, fourth's, her eyes flicking across autopsy images. Finally, she looks up, understanding. "Who did the draws?" she asks.

"That, my dear Molly," he replies with a grin, "is the question."

At half past midnight there were five faces tacked to the wall, set with five pairs of cold, lightless, lifeless eyes. By half past two, there is only one, the eyes equally cold, equally lightless. Lifeless, yet very much alive. A noted hematologist and humanitarian – a soon-to-be noted murderer too, given away by inexcusably sloppy syringe-work. He smiles. "Always so desperate to get caught," he murmurs.

It has been a productive night, and with the unique altruism of achievement, he can admit that the success is shared, can even acknowledge the likelihood that without Molly Hooper, he would still be staring at her ceiling rather than his serial killer. He turns to tell her so…and finds she is curled on her bed – his bed – and sound asleep.

Somehow, the sight stops him short. His bed. He is oddly, acutely aware of the possessive.

She is predictably ungraceful in sleep. Not for Molly the Woman's perfumed polish, no seductive set of lashes and lips, no subtle suggestion of legs beneath sheets. He felt admiration, then, for the completeness of the picture, almost more than for its allure. For the Woman's careful cultivation of a fantasy, which extended even to slumber. He feels something else, now, for Molly's singular inelegance.

She's breathing deeply, and a limp, dull brown tendril catches on each exhalation. As it settles back down, her forehead creases, her nose wrinkles. Finally, she gives a frustrated groan, reaches up, paws it clumsily away. At intervals, the tip of her tongue darts out to moisten the left corner of her lower lip. He remembers seeing chapstick, somewhere….

She is utterly unselfconscious, stripped of pretense and insecurity.

As he watches, she shifts, and one plaid-panted leg curls in against the cold. He realizes she's atop the coverlet rather than beneath it, and before he quite knows what he's doing, he's two steps closer and tucking her in.

His mind rarely moves more slowly than his limbs, and he muses that for something supposedly tender, protectiveness is surprisingly propulsive. A palm at the small of her back, a slight lift, a tug of blankets up under her chin. She sighs softly, burrows into the fabric. Surprisingly painful too, he thinks, and wonders why.

He stretches out beside her, a foot and the bedspread between them. He rests his elbows on either side of his torso, steeples his fingers above his chest. After a moment, he turns his head, carefully, deliberately, to look at her.

He lies perfectly still, his eyes tracing the freckle constellation across her skin. The galaxy glows plastic and puerile above them.

Sebastian Moran.

The name emerges, finally, from beneath the images and files and blood-smeared, ruined lives, the high-piled detritus of Moriarty's downfall.

Sebastian Moran. Sebastian Moran. Sebastian Moran.

He stares at it through bloodshot eyes where it's scrawled across the wallpaper. Five syllables, fourteen letters. A deceptively innocuous answer to the question: what sits at the center of the web once the spider is dead? He is dangerous, a second-in-command set free, a terrible butterfly shucking away the remnants of a cage, an arachnid extending a leg to manipulate another's threads. Dismantling Moriarty's network began with photographs tacked to walls; it will end, he now knows, with either Moran's death or his own.

And yet – he cannot think. He has been awake for seventy-seven hours, and his brain is betraying him, reducing him to sludgy thoughts, to muddy, meaningless metaphors. A butterfly, a spider. Smoke. The smooth introduction of needle to pulse. Stimulation and sedation on demand. Moran, Moran, Moran.

"Sherlock?"

Molly is beside him. He did not hear her enter and wishes she hadn't. The last thing he needs right now is her. He ignores the sudden, gentle pressure of her hand upon her arm.

"Sherlock." Another pause. Then, more insistently, "Sherlock."

He makes a frustrated sound.

"Sherlock, please –"

"Molly!" he bellows. And then, in a sarcastic sing-song, "Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly."

He doesn't have to look up to know he's stunned her, perhaps, if he's lucky, to silence. But, no; a beat later, she says, hesitantly, "Yes?"

His tone, when he answers, is jeering and cruel. "I'm sorry, I was under the impression we were saying each other's names over and over and over with no apparent purpose other than to render ourselves incapable of coherent thought."

"All right," she snaps, her voice abruptly high and loud, "that's it." She begins to negotiate the room, thrusting strewn pages into piles, shoving them into file boxes with jerky, graceless movements. "You're being insufferable and unbearable and intolerable and –"

"Invested in a thesaurus, have you?" he returns derisively. The old thesaurus retort, used many times on previous flatmates. John Watson, at least, knew when to shut up; Molly Hooper, it seems, does not.

She continues heedless, nearly sputtering with agitation. "– will not stand by while you work yourself to death. You need a good night's sleep, and then –"

"What I need, Molly," he snarls, "is a stimulant."

That stops her short. She pauses mid-shove to stare at him, wide-eyed. He lets out a mirthless laugh. "Come now, Doctor Hooper," he continues, his words an ugly, mocking mess. "Surely you've heard. Sherlock's got a drug problem."

There is a merciful moment of quiet. Which she ruins with a soft, "I hadn't. Heard." She swallows and meets his eyes determinedly. "But look, Sherlock, you have to rest. I know you run differently than the rest of us, but it's been three days, and even you –"

"An expert on the sleeping habits of sociopaths, are you?" He cannot stop himself. Propulsive. "Tell me, did you gain this expertise during your amorous exploits with Jim? Because you will forgive me for discounting any facts you believe you discerned during that relationship, given that you failed to discern that he was a mass murderer and you were an inconveniently chatty hospital access tag that happened to generate orgasms."

Utter silence.

He doesn't have to be a social savant to catch the hurt as it hurtles off her. Painful. She lets out a long breath, her throat catching strangely on the exhalation. "You're a bastard, Sherlock," she confirms. Then she turns and leaves him in what he thought would be peace but isn't.

"I am sorry."

He knows she's awake by the irregularity of her breathing, which is loud in the close confines of the spare bedroom. But she doesn't respond.

"I am sorry," he repeats.

This time, she props herself up on her elbows. "What are you doing, Sherlock?" she asks, and there is a strange mix of wariness and weariness in her voice, as if she isn't sure exactly what he'll say but is sure it'll hurt and has resigned herself to the wound. That knowledge hurts him, somehow.

"Apologizing," he says. "Not looming," he adds, for clarity, even though he patently is.

There is a pause. "You should be sleeping."

"I know. You're right. You were right."

She is silent again.

"Well," he says finally, clearing his throat, "I'll get to it then, shall I?"

He's made it to the doorway when she speaks. "What drugs?"

He turns slowly to face her. "Molly –"

"Sherlock," she insists, gently, but firmly. She pushes herself upright, and his eyes follow her fingertips as they hover, hesitating, over the bedspread, then finally come to rest on the fabric. She pats it. He raises his gaze to hers. "What drugs?" she murmurs.

He lets out a long breath, then takes the few steps to cross the room. She pulls back the blankets, and he slides in beside her.

They lie there, still and untouching, and at first he thinks she's gotten it all wrong, that she's under the mistaken impression that inviting him into her bed will render an uncomfortable social interaction less so. He's seen an inexcusable number of people fall prey to the elementary error of conflating physical and emotional proximity.

But then he feels it, becomes aware of it, rather: the same something strange he felt in the entry three weeks ago, the same short-stopping possessiveness he felt in her – his – bed three days ago, propulsive and painful and protective. He shifts to look at her; his vision has adjusted to the dimness, and her eyes seem bright in the dark. Maybe she hasn't conflated proximities after all.

"Morphine," he answers, "and cocaine. Strictly past tense, but quite a lot, then."

To her credit, she doesn't flinch. All she says is, "Why?"

He considers. It's not a question he's ever been asked. "Morphine to stop my brain…thinking all the time. Cocaine to start it up again."

She exhales, then moves closer. Her palm finds his forearm, just beneath the elbow. "Oh, Sherlock," she whispers. He blames those two words, and the touch, for the way his fingers come up to brush the wisp of hair, ever-present when she sleeps, from her face. He tucks it behind her ear. She looks at him and breathes.

"And," he says into the silence, "it didn't feel half bad either."

She lets out a shocked, throaty laugh. "You are ridiculous, Sherlock Holmes."

He smiles.

After a moment, she asks, more seriously, "Does John know?"

"Yes."

"Greg?"

"He has some idea."

"And I didn't. I never noticed."

He hesitates. "No."

"I didn't notice about Jim either," she says, looking past him. "You were right about that." He doesn't reply. He's not sure she's speaking to him at all. "But he was so nice and normal – well, not normal, exactly – but he watched Glee with me, and he loved Toby, and –"

"Serial killers are often partial to animals," he observes.

Her eyes flick back to his, and she gives another breathy laugh. "Well," she replies, shaking herself, "it's a good thing you hate Toby then."

That makes him grin. "Perhaps we should alert Donovan," he suggests. "She will be vastly relieved." This time, her laughter is full and gratifying.

The next morning, he wakes with her body warm against his. He presses a light kiss to her temple before he goes.

Every day he's away, he wonders if she's filled in the holes in her bedroom wall yet.